ActiON, aka Web Dashboard 3.0

@625alex Pictures are the key :slight_smile: It is now installed. The issue was that I must have had an error the first time and so I did not have the buttons on the right hand side to click. I followed the screen shots exactly and it installed. Thanks so much!

Let’s start with this teaser. The app itself to follow asap. Life gets in the way…

15 Likes

Awesome stuff but as an old vet in coding and life, let life get in the way. It’s all Zen but you only so many years to do the stuff that matters.

@625alex

This is really great. I just updated everything without any issues. I have many Sonos speakers around the house. How do I add those? I currently only see them listed as Switches.

I’m getting errors when I try to save and exit the ST app. I started completely from scratch as well. Same error. Unknown error and nothing in the IDE logs.

@cjkeeme and @RichardH
Guys, wait for the signal! I’m not sure what you are installing, I didn’t make any announcements yet, I’m in the process of cleaning up the code.

That’s the whole point: we can’t wait!!

Sorry Alex - I blame Jeff! :slight_smile:

The new version is finally here!
ActiON-Dashboard 4

Please continue discussion in the new thread.
Thank you all for support!!! I appreciate all your contributions!

5 Likes

Wonderful app but in order to get it to work I had to put try {} catch {} around isActive and getDeviceValue because the TCP light is returning something strange (even after I disconnected it from the app!).

I’ve done my own restful interface for my apps but your effort is far more complete – it would be great to have restful access to this app including notifications of changes.

Worth my donation in any case.

Are you referring to version 3 or 4?

TCP light are returning something strange for energy meter reading. There are other devices that freak out when you call getValue on them. It’s a good idea to wrap it in try/catch, so that the dashboard would remain at least useful. I will do that from now on.

Unfortunately, the device type code for TCP lights is not published, so I couldn’t figure out exactly what’s causing the error. I don’t know why you are getting the error after disconnecting the bulb, but it feels that it didn’t actually disconnect.

What do you mean by this?

Thank you for your donation!

Using the latest V4. TCP has had other problems with the software so I’m not using it for now and I unchecked it form the app so surprised it is showing up at all.

As to the restful – which part. Restful or notification? When I turn on a light from another path I notice that the change is reflect in the browser. How is that is that implemented? I would want some mechanism whether a persistent XmlHTTP request or a websocket interface that allows me to get an event when there is a change.

I added error handling as you suggested.

Synchronization is implemented by polling. SmartThings has no provisions for any sort of event streaming.

It’s possible to create a simple smart app that will post events to a third party stream.

In fact in my own ST app I send an HTTP message to a wired in URL with the change in device information. One step better would allow me to supply URLs for notification. This doesn’t work quite as well for a browser-based app – that’s where an open HTTP request of Websockets are an alternative though I don’t think ST supports Websockets.

Note that others use MQTT for this. In fact my app was based on code by David Janes at https://iotdb.org/. Your efforts are complementary.

I deliberately chose not to use any third party services for a number of reasons:

  • For the average users it too troubling to setup their own streaming service.
  • It introduces another point of failure.
  • For most users it’s not necessary.
  • Users own their data and traffic.

This app fulfills the need to simply view and interact with devices, it is just a dashboard.

People were asking for voice control, Tasker integration, event history. These are different use cases, different apps.

If ST had support for WebSockets or SSE, things would’ve been different.

Appreciate the choices as well as looking the the code to get a better understanding of the ST platfrom.

Hi @625alex,

I just installed the new Dashboard on my ST and I am getting “Unexpected error has occured.” So I re-installed it and as a test only added one light and went for the URL and found this:

{“error” : “true” : “Unauthorized” , “message” : “invalid access token: null”}

I still have a link to the old 4.6.2 shortcut on two of my tablet dashboards in my house. Could that be the cause of that? Do I need to remove those shortcuts and re-install the new dashboard?

Assuming you are using version 4 (are you in the wrong thread?) try to reset access token in SmartApp preferences. This happens sometimes for unknown reasons.

Sorry :relaxed: Will repost.